Louis le Brocquy, H.R.H.A.

Esther Robles Gallery, Los Angeles;
Mr and Mrs Louis Gaines, bought from above;
Private collection;
Sotheby's, London, 13 May 2005, lot 94, where purchased by the present owner

Limerick, The Hunt Museum, The Custom House, Louis le Brocquy, Allegory and Legend, 2006, catalogue not numbered

Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Dublin, 1981, illus. p.82, cat.no.48 (dated 1946)

STRUCTURE The board is sound. There is a faint diaganol surface abrasion near the centre of the left edge, approximately 1 inch long, and a tiny fleck of paint loss near the lower right edge. ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT Under UV there appear to be no signs of retouching. FRAME Held in a gilt wood frame with a canvas inset.
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Painted in 1945, Travelling People is important in being the first oil from le Brocquy's famed 'traveller' series, rather than Tinkers Resting (1946, Tate Gallery, London) as has previously been recorded. Le Brocquy had first come across the travelling people outside Tullamore, Co. Offaly, in 1945 and the simultaneous date of the present work suggests that it was most probably painted whilst the artist was actually in Ireland, the image and theme fresh in his mind. The other oils were all worked up from initial studies executed in situ and then translated in the artist's studio in Marylebone, London where he moved in 1946.  The series culminated with Man Creating Bird (1948).

The traveller pictures are unique works, a reflection on the nature of the sitters, yet bear recurring elements as hallmarks. These unifying traits are firstly the individual, representative motifs within the paintings, and then secondly the overall stylistic cohesiveness exhibited by the group. Travelling People sits comfortably within the close-knit nature of the group of known works. Here we see a family gather about the ritual task of making a twig sign on leaving camp, as seen in Traveller Making Twig Sign (1946, sold in these rooms, 18^th May 2001, lot 233). The signs were thought to indicate to new arrivals the whereabouts of water, chickens and enemies, but also to incorporate blessings or curses, and thus the 'settled' community were afraid to touch them.

In the war-torn landscape of mid-century Europe, refugee communities had become a familiar sight, yet with the travellers as painted by le Brocquy, their very dispossession leads to their feeling positively and extrovertedly alive. Alistair Smith has called the twig pictures the most telling of the series in their encapsulation of the 'outsider' theme which gives them their impact, a potency perhaps due in part to a direct emotional link between sitters and painter, both inhabiting positions on the margins of respectable society. Beyond the action of the scene, further narrative details recur in Tinkers Resting, Sick Tinker Child (1946, sold in these rooms, 18^th May 2001, lot 236) and Travelling Woman with Newpaper (1947-48, sold in these rooms, 18^th May 2000, lot 158): a male figure, muffled with eyes deep-set beneath a flat cap, seated with his back hunched in habit against the bite of the elements; similar triangular compositions of families grouped in front of gabled, barrel-roofed caravans; the moon lighting whitewashed cottages silhouetted against the emerald green of the hills; figures with coarse-cropped flaming red hair; and central matriarchs, standing four-square and dressed in typical jewel-coloured patchwork skirts under heavy shawls.

Dorothy Walker has described how in the mid-1940s the nomadic life of the travellers 'was still vital and picturesque'. The colour of such scenes, whether presented by Irish tinkers or Hungarian gypsies, attracted many artists including the British painters Dame Laura Knight and Sir Alfred Munnings, as well as Sir William Orpen and Jack B. Yeats. Walker explains that the travellers inspired in le Brocquy, 'bright Picassoesque paintings, in which the tinkers' own farouche social habits are portrayed in light-hearted colour. He combines in these paintings the sense of deep inner merriment with a parallel sense of murderous violence which may erupt at any moment, and it is the only occasion in his paintin gcareer that he uses bright, gay harlequin colours' (Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Dublin 1981, p.23).

Walker's use of the word 'harlequin' suggests the saltimbanques of Picasso's Rose period, yet the Travelling People did not lend themselves as subjects to the soft melancholy of these works, exhibiting instead a rather more bare-foot, raw-skinned reality. Whilst the pictures offer rich colour and vibrant patterning of line, they had an edge to them due more to the second influence stemming from Picasso's synthetic cubism, particularly as used by the older artist to such effect in Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid). The shadow of war is as importrant to le Brocquy's work in the 1940s as it is central to Guernica. Smith explains how, given Hitler's denunciation of the Cubist style as degenerative, 'to employ [it] in the war era was, quite simply, a declaration of belief in freedom itself' (Alistair Smith, Louis le Brocquy, Paintings 1939-1996, exh.cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 1996, p.24). The influx of émigrés during the war years served to some extent to disseminate new ideas and experience, yet this did not stop le Brocquy and a small group of Irish artists from actively combating the dangers of cultural isolation, a tendency to which an island nation was particularly prone. It was this awareness that prompted the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art in September 1943 and it was articulated most immediately through the traveller series – to the point that having fed on Picasso, le Brocquy's art in turn was to have an influence still further afield.  It is possible that Willem de Kooning may have seen the largest of the tinker pictures, Travelling Woman with Newspaper at the British Council Exhibition in Amsterdam in 1949 and his 'Women' pictures of Abstract Expressionism in America in the 1950s have since necessarily been viewed in the light of le Brocquy's influence.